Two private museums in the Netherlands have made human flesh the subject of an exhibition this autumn. In Bergen (NH) it is about Bare, and in Delden (Ov) it is about nude. But where one exhibition (at Museum Kranenburg in Bergen) seems to be mainly an ode to the free-spirited 1970s and what happened afterwards, Museum No Hero in Delden asks uncomfortable questions.
The Delden expo '#metoo, Naked in the Arts' is the kind of guerilla exhibition a small museum can be big on. Director Gemma Boon conceived the exhibition in early October, when there was a small riot in the neighbourhood, Almelo to be precise, around a painting by Overijssel artist Joep Gierveld. That painting, showing a naked woman between two dressed dignitaries, had been hanging in the hall of the courthouse since 1992, but now had to be removed because a female visitor took offence to it. It reminded her too much of the violence that had been done to her. The painting has now been moved to a non-public part of the building. Meanwhile, a debate flared up about censorship, artistic freedom and the right to be shocked or shocked.
Five centuries of nudity
Gemma Boon then went searching through No Hero's collection to put together an exhibition that should be about those very boundaries: what vínden we actually get from those works, and the female nudity depicted on them. The exhibition includes an overview of female nudes from five centuries of art. Via the audio tour, you get explanations. Those explanations are always about the question you would rather not ask when you have put on your aesthetic museum glasses: what is actually behind that nude? What is the painter's message, why is there nudity to be seen?
Thus, the museum makes a sometimes uneasy connection old romantic work and Bas Meerman's work derived from pornography. His work Mowgli (named after the youthful protagonist of Jungle Book) is the exhibition's most awkward focal point. Is it a child depicted here in an obviously sexual pose? Did the painter work 'to life' or 'from memory'? (The latter, it turns out)
In your face
After visiting this exhibition in this extremely sympathetic, small museum, you start thinking about some obvious things in a different way, which is actually quite nice. Especially since the exhibition at the Bergen museum Kranenburg leaves all those tricky questions a bit unanswered. For this overview of exposure in art and advertising, compiler Thomas Widdershoven draws partly from his own oeuvre as an advertiser. Because much of the work on show is also media work, the atmosphere is more 'in your face'. The discomfort is missing. At most, perhaps, about Thomas Widdershoven's SP election spot in which a very elderly lady performs a striptease to make a point about privacy in healthcare. The spot has often been on TV and was controversial. Now it figures prominently in the basement of with museum. It is mostly beautiful and aesthetic, on reflection.
The nudity Widdershoven collects in Kranenburg is actually unerotic. In fact, the compiler avoids discussing whether nudity in art can also be eroticising. Nudity is nudity. In No Hero, Gemma Boon actually probleatises the eroticising effect of (mainly female) nudity, without lifting a moralising finger.
In fact, you should just go and see them both.
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